Posted on 04/21/2005 11:58:32 AM PDT by lizol
Two Million Unsaved Jews
By Pavel Polyan special to The Moscow News
Hitler offered to send German Jews to the United States, the UK, and the Soviet Union. All of these countries declined the offer. Then the Holocaust began
Lying in front of me is a remarkable document from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. It is a letter by Ye. I. Chekmenev, head of the Resettlement Administration under the USSR Council of People's Commissars (SNK), to SNK Chairman V. M. Molotov, dated February 9, 1940. Following is the text in full: "The SNK Resettlement Administration has received two letters from the Berlin and Vienna resettlement bureaus concerning the resettlement of Jews from Germany to the USSR - specifically to Birobidzhan and the Western Ukraine.
"Under the evacuation agreement between the USSR Government and Germany, only ethnic Ukrainians, Belorussians, Rusins, and Russians are subject to evacuation to Soviet territory.
"We believe that the proposals by the aforementioned resettlement bureaus cannot be accepted.
"Awaiting further instructions.
"Appendix: on six sheets."
Had they been indicated in the letter, the names of the German addressers would have startled us since the Berlin and Vienna resettlement bureaus were at that time headed by Adolf Eichmann (appointed in October 1939) and Franz Walter Stahlecker, respectively. And hanging over them was the shadow of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
Chekmenev's name is not generally known even to sophisticated Russian historians. As for the SNK Resettlement Administration that he was in charge of, it was indeed the most appropriate addressee for the high ranking SS officials. This organization was responsible for nationwide resettlement programs that were carried out mainly on a voluntary basis - in contrast to the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (GULAG) or the NKVD Special Settlements Department.
It was no accident that German state officials turned to their Soviet counterparts. At that time, "the ultimate solution to the Jewish question" in Germany was still conceived of as emigration, not extermination. In the second half of October 1939, Operation Nisko - a plan to deport 4,000 to 5,000 Czech and Austrian Jews to a special Jewish reservation near Lublin - ended in failure. In late October, the deportation was halted, mainly because of the objections raised by the newly appointed Governor General Frank who wanted his fiefdom to be "Judenfrei" ("Jew-free").
The next attempt to establish a Jewish reservation was the so-called Madagascar Plan. The idea was to extend the "Judenfrei" status to the whole of Europe. Germany wanted France to give it a mandate to govern the tropical island (Madagascar was a French colony). Jews were supposed to engage in agricultural production there under the supervision of a police governor appointed by Himmler. The plan was abandoned when the military situation on the maritime theaters of operation changed for the worse - what with the Battle of Britain lasting much longer than planned and with Hitler's decision in the fall of 1940 to invade the Soviet Union.
Eichmann and Stahlecker's letters to Chekmenev reveal a hitherto unknown plan "to resolve the Jewish question" by deporting German, Czech, and Polish Jews to the Soviet Union. If the idea originated in December 1939-January 1940 and the letters were sent (apparently by diplomatic mail) in late January 1940, the initiative must have come in the period between the Nisko and Madagascar plans.
To the Soviet addressee, however, the offer did not look particularly attractive. In 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (region) was established in Eastern Siberia. The 1936-37 spy scare and the subsequent Great Terror made the resettlement of foreign Jews to Birobidzhan all but an unviable proposition.
Nor did the Soviet Union take the slightest interest in the International Conference on Jewish Refugees that took place in Evian in July 1938. At the same time, during this period the Soviet Union, trumpeting its internationalism from the rooftops, took in thousands of Spanish refugees. As for sympathy for the opponents and victims of Nazism, it was limited to a handful of Communists and their families as well as luminaries like world chess champion Emanuel Lasker.
Even so, Soviet-German cooperation in certain areas was quite successful. Following the partitioning of Poland, the two countries carried out a population exchange program. This resulted in the establishment in October 1939 of a joint German-Soviet evacuation commission, headed up by M. M. Litvinov and K. von Remphochener. The first 1,050 people were sent to Germany from the town of Vladimir-Volynsky on December 20, 1939. The evacuation was completed by February 4, affecting a total of approximately 130,000 people. Neither Slavs nor Jews were covered by the program, while Aryans were strongly advised to divorce their "underclass," "undesirable" spouses. The number of those wishing to move to the Soviet Union was approximately 40,000, including a considerable proportion of Jews, but the Soviet side agreed to accept only 20,000, later taking in another 14,000.
Following Germany's attack on Poland, September 1, 1939, a large number of Polish citizens, mainly Jews, fled from Poland to the "land of salvation" - to the East. Those who managed to find a roof over their heads and stay with their relatives, while agreeing to accept Soviet citizenship, were relatively safe. The rest faced deportation to Siberia. On June 29, 1940, 77,000 (according to other estimates, 90,000) "resettlers/refugees" were sent to special settlements in the north of the Soviet Union - to work as loggers. It must be said, however, that the Soviet deportation in the end saved the majority of them.
Of the approximately 2 million Jews who lived in Poland before German occupation, about 150,000 fled to the Soviet zone of occupation, including dozens of those who had run away from the Nisko reservation. Add here another 350,000 to 400,000 Jews in the Reich (including Austrian, Czech, and Bohemian Jews). It is these 2.1 million to 2.2 million Jews that Eichmann and Stahlecker refer to in their letter to Commissar Chekmenev. Getting rid of them was Hitler's psychopathic dream as well as his political objective.
But was Hitler's offer desirable to Stalin? No, the gift would have been a white elephant for the Soviet tyrant. If German Jews were allowed to live as free citizens in any part of the country, just think how many security police forces would have been required to look after them! Surely they could not have been sent en masse to the GULAG or to special settlements (colonies), as had been the case with many thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland.
When his offer was turned down (or more likely, when he did not get any response from Moscow), chances are that Eichmann was hardly upset. Yet the series of failures with a territorial solution to the Jewish question (Nisko, Madagascar, Birobidzhan) definitely precipitated the search for another "solution" - far more radical and devastating.
It went down in history as the Holocaust.
Ping
Unbelievable. This should set an example to people of all nations and races; if you do not protect yourselves then no one else will.
Or - you can count, count on yourself.
I'm a little unclear as to the intent of this article.
Is the author's point that, if only the U.S, the U.K., and/or the Soviet Union had taken in six million people, there would have been no Holocaust? ...and by extension, these countries are culpable?
Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. Given what we know now, I feel reasonably sure that the three countries would have found a way (at least two of them would have).
No one could have foreseen that Hitler actually planned to kill six million people, though.
Soviets and Germans agree to final solution of Jews. And the Stormfront trolls would have us believe we fought the wrong country during WWII. We fought the nazis until 1945, then the commies from 1945 until they collapsed in 1991. Only difference is that the russians had nukes. Imagine that inbred, effeminate little Austrian having nukes?! I shudder.
Thanks!
These are both aspects of the tragedy that I had no knowledge of. I will start educating myself.
If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
You are right. Most Israelis know this better than anyone in todays world.
If FDR had opened America's doors instead of slamming them shut so many European Jews would have been saved from the death camps of German Nazism, as well as post-war Russian Communism.
If FDR had opened America's doors instead of slamming them shut so many European Jews would have been saved from the death camps of German Nazism, as well as post-war Russian Communism.
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Sadly the same happened in many other countries including the UK. WW2 is a lesson to everyone to be prepared.
So true, and then after the war unfortunately Britain & other Allied nations kept Jewish DP (Displaced Person) survivors of the death camps in similar 'living' conditions.
Madness.
I'm not an expert on how well FDR took advantage of his powers to save Jews and other people in danger of being killed by the Nazis, but Congress had passed the laws setting up quotas based on national origins, and could have changed the laws...so maybe they deserve some of the blame.
"Hitler offered to send German Jews to the United States, the UK, and the Soviet Union. All of these countries declined the offer. Then the Holocaust began"
This is stupid. Next he would have offered to "send" Gypsies, Poles plus a few other nations and most of Europe would have been conquered without one shot.
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